Tag Archives: conferences

JSFoo/HasGeek’s JavaScript HackNight Pune – Jan 14

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No matter what programming language and platform you work on today, it is almost certain that at least one of the user interfaces to your software product/service is written using JavaScript. JavaScript is easily the language that is available on far, far more computing devices in the world than any other language, considering it is present by default on all desktop browsers and most mobile phone browsers. Thus, if your in the software space, is no alternative but to accept JavaScript – it is the default.

A JavaScript hack night – i.e. a night of hacking on JavaScript with 30 others from Pune and elsewhere in India has been organized on Saturday, 14th January, at AmiWorks office (SB Road, Pune), in conjunction with the [JSFoo] JavaScript in conference which will also be held in Pune a week later. (To clarify, the JavaScript Hacknight is on 14th Jan, night, and the [JSFoo] conference is on 21st January, daytime.)

The hacknight is open for any registered participant of the [JSFoo] conference, but since space is limited at the venue, you will need to register separately for it. All you need to do is get your laptop, and get ready for lots of JavaScript programming, learning, and discussions. To get an idea of what a JSFoo hacknight is like, check out these videos from JSFoo Hacknight Bangalore.

Event Report: IndicThreads Java Conference 2011

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(This article about the IndicThreads Java Conference 2011 was written by Abhay Bakshi for DZone. It has been re-published here with permission for the benefit of PuneTech readers.)

Attending a conference (probably as renowned and as recognized as the Java conference by IndicThreads) adds to your muscle – Period. By the way, I have picked up from the same thread — same tone and similar spirit — from March 2011. IndicThreads held the Q11 conference then, which I had a chance to attend and then write a short report on for DZone. If you attended IndicThreads conferences before, your feedback is also welcome — through your blogs or through places like this report hosting page.

Now, you may ask – How Was the Environment This Time?

First and foremost, I would like to say this — you could feel the thought process from Harshad Oak (Owner – IndicThreads – Conference Organizer) all throughout the conference. When I attended the conference sessions, I could see that one presentation simply led to another one. And somehow I could also relate this fact to the earlier Q11 conference; and could see the passion that Harshad has when he arranges these events.

Just as a side note – Harshad is the first Java champion in India and he continues to serve the IT community. He is ably supported by his wife Sangeeta Oak in these endeavors. This young couple gives a lot of attention to detail for the events!

The Conference Agenda in short

The conference agenda included the following topics (Friday/Saturday — Dec 02/03):

  • The Java Report (Harshad Oak)
  • Scalability Considerations (Yogesh Deshpande)
  • PaaSing a Java EE 6 Application (Kshitiz Saxena)
  • Solr as your Search and Suggest Engine (Karan Nangru)
  • Testing Concurrent Java Programs (Sameer Arora)
  • Scala Collections: Expressivity and Brevity upgrade from Java (Dhananjay Nene)
  • REST Style Web Services – Google Protocol Buffers (Prasad Nirantar)
  • Java EE 7 Platform: Developing for the Cloud (Kshitiz Saxena – yes again! He has awesome topic coverage.)
  • Building Massively Scalable Applications with Akka (Vikas Hazrati)
  • Simplifying builds with Gradle (Saager Mhatre)
  • Using Scala for Building DSLs (Abhijit Sharma)

The presentation slides are hosted at http://j11.indicthreads.com/slides

My Thoughts on the Agenda

On the first day of the conference, I noticed that there are 7 sessions to attend on Friday and 4 more sessions on Saturday. Frankly, I thought there was some kind of mismatch in arranging these sessions. But my opinion changed as the conference went on from Friday into Saturday. The next day was intentionally kept lighter. As an attendee, I now think that your mind probably absorbs and retains more information during the initial parts of a conference. I believe that IndicThreads is getting better overall conference after conference.

What I Wanted to Get from Each Session

I planned on getting 3 things from the sessions (that was my ROI!) — first, how the knowledge earned will apply towards the business domain at my work place; second, my personal interactions with the speaker(s) from networking perspectives; and third, how I can help Harshad and his team and provide helpful feedback. Even with events like NFJS, TSSS in USA, I always received and offered my best to organizers Jay Zimmerman, Floyd Marinescu et al.

I should also mention, I still remember Rick Ross’ keynote speech at TSSS and how it was inspirational to many of us there. Point is that industry leaders like Harshad, Rick, Floyd (and of course some more) are doing everything to lead developers all across the world to be better IT professionals. Sometimes they pay from their own pockets to see results.

The Actual Sessions

I am not going to cover all the details from all the talks, well, it’s not possible. The slides are available for entire content.

The Java Report

In the keynote speech, Harshad mentioned that things moved very rapidly after Sun was purchased by Oracle. He later encouraged participants to have a look at topics such as Java EE 6 Web Profile, Java FX 2.0 (all Java), Java EE 7 and a few more. Harshad raised a point – do you as a Java expert look the same “sexy” today as you did when Java started? The answer is “less sexy”. He also said that Java ME was not offering many new things for quite a while now.

Scalability Considerations

Yogesh covered Vertical Scaling and Horizontal Scaling, and principles behind both techniques. He backed up his presentation with a helpful case study.

PaaSing a Java EE 6 Application

Kshitiz works at Sun/Oracle for last 10 years. He explained PaaS in simpler terms. It was very important to keep things simple. The speech was well accepted by the audience. Just as I was putting this article together, I saw that Javalobby had published a fresh article on PaaS 2.0 — it looks quite relevant to our discussion.

Solr as Your Search and Suggest Engine

It was very good to learn from Karan about Embedded Solr Server versus Commons Http Solr Server, and the various “search” and “suggestion” cases. Karan is quite passionate about Solr.

Testing Concurrent Java Programs

I don’t develop as much concurrent Java code at work as I do some other pieces; but learning from Sameer clicked a few ideas in my mind for a business case that we have at work. We (AEGIS) do some case executions in our workflow, and ideas from concurrency can be applied to what we do. By the way, for the intense session that we had with Sameer, fortunately, there was a coffee break after the session. Hats off to Sameer for how much he knows about this topic.

Scala Collections – Expressivity and Brevity upgrade from Java

Although Dhananjay knew a lot, he was addressing a very specific topic “Collections”. To me, the topic could have been broader (or be split in two sessions). Scala is a powerful language and initial learning curve looks longer for a beginner. I should mention that Dhananjay preferred IntelliJ for Scala-based development — rightfully so.

REST Style Web Services – Google Protocol Buffers

Prasad (speaker) has a background from Akron, Ohio (M.S.). He compared content negotiation techniques (JSON, XML, and Portable Binary Content) with focus on Google Protocol Buffers. His comparison of Google Protocol Buffers with Apache Avro was very apt.

Java EE 7 Platform: Developing for the Cloud

Kshitiz explained the terms IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. There are vendors other than Sun that offer PaaS support — but standards are lacking. He explained Java EE 7 focus on PaaS – Elasticity which has progressed from single node implementation to multi-node multi-instance clustering to SLA driven Elasticity. Refer the slides for more details.

Building Massively Scalable Applications with Akka

Vikas writes for InfoQ. He said that if you wanted to learn Akka, then you needed to keep in mind that Akka was designed to make developer’s life easier by addressing concurrency, scalability and fault-tolerance in applications. The founder of Akka is Jonas Boner, and I find Jonas’ article on Akka hosted by Javalobby at this page. As per Vikas, Akka is good for event-based systems, whereas Hadoop for batch-based systems.

Simplifying Builds (Build Scripts) with Gradle

An excellent slide presentation and visual illustrations by Saager. He corrected the name of the topic to “Simplifying build scripts..”. He compared Gradle with Ant and Maven, and mentioned that Gradle describes builds with only as much text as is absolutely necessary.

Using Scala for Building DSLs

This was the only session where there were no questions from the audience! From Abhijit’s (speaker) angle, it was a bit uncomfortable feeling; but I later mentioned to him that the presentation was so straight-forward (note – not an easy compilation) and neatly arranged, the questions were answered even before they were asked. I recommend – just download the presentation, and you will get to see what I mean. Good to learn about Scala in this domain.

Every session was little over an hour. And all speakers covered their sessions very well.

Past Reviews of IndicThreads Conference on Java

Some of the celebrity authors and speakers like Arun Gupta and Vikas Hazrati have reviewed their prior Java IndicThreads conference experiences by writing articles on their respective blogs (you may access the reviews: Arun, Vikas). It is rewarding to learn from such experts in the field.

Lastly, about the Food and Quizzes and Prizes!

I believe, Sangeeta made awesome choices for food at lunch and the breaks! As well as, she put up short quizzes and announced prizes in different categories. IndicThreads have maintained the “Green” theme and I won a prize in that category.

My Top Three Take-away Points

My top three take away points from J11 are – rejuvenating yourself by looking at technical topics from speakers’/attendees’ eyes and adding to your knowledge, networking with experts so that you can offer your best and receive the best from them, and just knowing where the Java industry stands today.

Conclusion

There was an “Unconference” session, where everybody who participated voiced a need for the Java groups in the city to come together. I get a feel that awareness in the industry about such conferences is increasing, and demand for such speakers and quality offered by these conferences is going to increase in few more short years.

Harshad encourages local speakers to come out and respond to the RFPs (and participate). For those who only want to attend can also win a FREE pass to the conference! All in all, it was worth attending the Java conference by IndicThreads.

Advantage Pune Panel Discussion: Opportunities for Pune to become an Innovation Hub

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These are a few quick ‘n dirty notes captured during a Panel Discussion that was held as a part of the “Global Conclave: Advantage Pune” event held in Pune yesterday, organized by Zinnov and Software Exporters Association of Pune (SEAP). The panel discussion was on the topic “Opportunities and Challenges for Pune to become an Innovation Hub”. The panelists were:

  • Bhavani Shankar from Zinnov
  • Akila Krishnakumar head of Sungard India
  • Ashish Deshpande from Google (based in Pune)
  • Kiran Gadi head of Motorola Mobility India
  • Omkar Nimbalkar head of Tivoli Group IBM India
  • Tarun Sharma head of BMC India

Overall, a few themes that most people touched upon were these:

  • Pune isn’t just about software. It has automotive, manufacturing, sciences (for example, NCL), and other things going for it. So it is more rounded than other cities
  • Pune has great climate
  • Pune has lots of educational instiutions
  • Pune is still not as crowded as Bangalore, so growth is still possible in Pune.

Overall, these are the advantages that Pune has for driving innovation.

Here are some additional interesting points made by the panelists:

  • [Akila] Sungard is probably one of the earliest Software Product MNCs to set up in Pune (back in 1993). Pune has 20% of Sungard’s global R&D strength. BFSI is the biggest market for the software sector, and hence a lot of innovation in Pune’s software industry has to happen (will happen) in this space
  • [Kiran] Our Pune center had lower attrition than other cities. This was a huge advantage.
  • [Tarun] 23% of BMC is in Pune. Largest in the world. This gives huge advantages – having many different teams in one location. This is easier to achieve do than in other cities.
  • [Omkar] Pune has an advantage over Bangalore that it still has space to grow. In Bangalore, it is very difficult to find space.
  • [Tarun] Pune definitely has a better perception of quality of life compared to Bangalore. It’s still a small city compared to Bangalore – you can get anywhere in 30 minutes. And the culture and art is great.
  • [Akila] Pune and Germany have had a great relationship, because of the auto industry. Pune has the largest concentration of German companies in India. This is a great opportunity for Pune’s software industry – it needs to leverage this and grow the software market in Europe.
  • [Kiran] The great thing about the Pune Community is that all the different groups (Software Exporters Association of Pune (SEAP), PuneTech, TiE, Pune Open Coffee Club, Head Start, CSI Pune) all talk to each other and co-operate.
  • [Akila] Pune’s demographics are interesting – lower than average age, and higher than average per capita income. It is easier to find early adopters in Pune, and easier to do viral (i.e., cheap) marketing in Pune. For example, it is not a surprise that it is the gaming capital of the country.

FUDCon – Conference for Fedora Linux Users and Developers – 4-6 Nov

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Abhijit A.M. of CoEP writes:

We are very pleased to invite you to FUDCON’11 (Fedora Users and Developers Conference) to be hosted in CoEP from 4th (Fri) to 6th (Sun) of Nov 2011. FUDCON is one of the world’s biggest Free and Open Source (FOSS) conferences. Fedora itself is one of the most popular GNU/Linux distributions. The event is being organized by the Fedora Community, sponsored by and in association with Dept. of Computer Engg and IT, CoEP and Red Hat, Inc. The event is open, and free for all to attend ! Please visit the FUDCon website for details.

FUDCON is the meeting place for Fedora developers, but in line with all FOSS conferences, the talks are always targeted to educate people on various FOSS technologies. So it is a unique opportunity for all the students to get exposed to a variety of state of the art technologies in FOSS domain. The bigger opportunity lies in getting a chance to meet and chat with some of the prolific programmers from all around the world. Here is the list of talks

Speakers and delegates will be visiting from many parts of the world for FUDCON. Please note that the sessions will be held in Barcamp style which is quite unconventional and different from the way regular conferences are conducted. The style is the one FOSS community works with. To get a better idea of the talks, please visit the FUDCon website and get yourself registered (Free of course!)

Top Indian Startup Event Unpluggd coming to Pune

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Pluggd.in is one of the most influential sites as far as coverage of Indian startups is concerned, and their event Unpluggd is now one of the premiere startup events in the country.

Unpluggd is coming to Pune on 19th November, so everybody interested in startups should seriously consider registering (click here (ayojak) or here (doattend) to buy tickets. (Ayojak is a Pune startup, so Pune loyalty dictates that you should try that first.) There is an early bird discount until 20th October (that’s just 2 days away), so you’ll need to hurry. (Use the code PIBUDDY to get your discount.)

If you have a startup, then Unpluggd is a great platform for showcasing your product. The who’s who of Indian startups will be here, and not only do you get exposure, but it also looks good on your startup’s resume (“selected for Unpluggd 2011”). So nominate yourself. Take a look at the nomination FAQs. (And while you’re in the nominating mood, if you happen to be a B2B startup, then nominate yourself for Pune Connect 2011 also.)

If you haven’t started your startup yet, but have an idea, and would like to get it kickstarted AND featured at Unpluggd, there is a way. Unpluggd is holding a Hackathon on 4/5/6 November in Bangalore, where they will provide you with everything necessary to convert your idea into a prototype – Mentors, Domain Experts, Food, Infrastructure. Two winning entries from Hackathon will get to demo their product at Unpluggd Pune. This is also a paid event, and the registration pages are the same as those for Unpluggd (links above; use early bird discount code HACKBUDDY).

Important dates: 20th Oct – deadline for early bird discount on Unpluggd. 4/5/6 Nov, Hackathon. 6th Nov, deadline for startup nomination for Unpluggd. 19th Nov Unpluggd.

(Note: Normally, PuneTech does not promote paid events on the front page (although we do include them in the PuneTech Calendar. We make exceptions if the ticket price is nominal (e.g. the Rs. 100 that TiE Pune charges for some of its events) or if the event is important enough and the price is low (e.g. a national/international event with a price that’s not too high). Unpluggd is being plugged here since it is in the second category.)

The Pune Effect or Why every technology conference must come to Pune

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“The Pune Effect: Any tech (un-)conference that happens in multiple cities in India will have its highest attendance when it comes to Pune”

It probably started in Sept, 2008, when PHPCamp got 1200+ online registrations, and 700+ people actually turned up, making it the largest unconference in India.

The following year, we organized an “Internship Mela” for students looking for internships amongst Pune’s startups, and we had to turn away 100s of students from the gates after we somehow managed to accommodate 800+.

Over the years, this trend has continued.

When DocType HTML5 came to Pune, the organizers had to shut down registrations after getting more than 600 registrations.

In July 2011, organizers of the Java 7 Launch event in Pune had to hastily shift the venue of the event to a larger hall when, unexpectedly, 400+ people registered unexpectedly

When we organized PyCon Pune, the International Python Conference, we were expecting it to be much smaller than the first two PyCon’s that were held in Bangalore, since the Python community in Bangalore is much stronger. However, once again, we had to close registrations after the number of paid registrations hit 650, since the venue wouldn’t take any more. Raymond Hettinger tweeted that this was probably the biggest PyCon outside the US.

Once is happenstance. Twice is co-incidence. More than that, and it needs to be given a name and a webpage of its own. Amit Kumar Singh called it “The Pune Effect” in a tweet in response to PyCon Pune becoming the biggest PyCon outside the US.

So, this webpage is dedicated to the Pune Effect, and the amazing tech community in Pune.

And it comes with a challenge.

A challenge to all organizers of tech events in India – Why are you not in Pune? I’m looking at you, NASSCOM Product Conclave, and DrupalCamp, and Amazon AWSCamp. If you’re an organizing a tech event in India, remember that if you skip Pune, you are missing out on your largest event.

And this is also a challenge to all the techies in Pune. We have to work to maintain this reputation. Follow the PuneTech Calendar where all the tech events happening in Pune are listed (you can subscribe to get all PuneTech events sent to you via email or via RSS), and the make it a point to attend. This will definitely help your career – you become more knowledgeable, and more importantly, you get to know lots of interesting and knowledgeable people. Not only should you attend tech events, but also drag some of your shy friends with you.

The most active tech community in the country is right here in Pune. Are you a part of it?

Call for Papers: ACM Pune’s Compute 2012 Conference on Intelligent & Scalable Systems

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ACM Pune writes

With the advent of information age/knowledge age powered by internet, increasingly large amount of information is being generated and is becoming accessible electronically. The internet has promoted and sped the growth of information. It is growing at an astounding pace and today has more than 34 Billion web pages. It is now an ocean with various kinds of artifacts. However most of the information artifacts are designed and developed for consumption by humans.

High performance computing systems are employed across diverse fields to simulate and study complex systems, and generate new knowledge and information. Advances in field range from hardware and software architecture techniques to novel applications, and are increasing the pace of generation of new knowledge and information. An important concern is the scalability of these techniques. Cloud computing, for instance, holds a lot of promise in this direction.

Enterprise systems are growing in size, large software frameworks are being deployed. The dynamic business scenarios are prompting mergers and acquisitions due to which different IT systems are interfaced with each other. This is increasing the complexities of the systems and there is significant learning curve to understand such applications. Enterprises are facing problems related to comprehension, knowledge representation and reasoning. The 21st century needs systems that that are less people dependent, able to capture expert knowledge, and equipped to handle information overload.

Compute 2012 invites submissions from both researchers and practitioners in the broad area of scalable and intelligent systems. An indicative list of appropriate topics is as follows:

  • Knowledge and Information Retrieval
    • Text-Based Information Retrieval, Text Mining
    • NLP- Text summarization, keyword extraction, topic identification
    • User Context Mining. Context models for IR, context analysis from social networks
    • Cross-language retrieval, multilingual retrieval, machine translation for IR
    • Semantic Web, Meta data analysis and tagging, knowledge extraction, inference, and maintenance
    • Information Retrieval models, language models, similarity measures, formal analysis
    • Information visualization
    • Mathematical Foundations of IR
    • Probabilistic, logic based IR models, and quantum mechanics Based IR models
    • New models, frameworks and approaches to IR Techniques
    • Classification, categorization, and clustering
    • Web IR
    • Machine learning for IR
    • Browsing, semantic search, meta-search
    • Knowledge Representation And Reasoning
    • Ontology learning
    • Semantic reasoning
    • Applications, services and systems based on semantic processing
    • Ontologies in practical knowledge and software engineering
    • Practical knowledge representation and discovery techniques in software engineering
    • Agent-oriented software engineering
    • AI approaches in software engineering process
    • Declarative, logic-based approaches
    • Vocabularies’, Ontologies and Rules for enterprise systems
    • Knowledge and software engineering for the Semantic Web
    • Web Mining including Web Intelligence and Web 3.0
    • Algorithms, methods, and technologies for building Web 3.0
    • Theoretical foundations of Semantic web (Description Logic)
  • High Performance Computing Track
    • Parallel Computing
    • Distributed Computing
    • Data Intensive computing
    • Grid computing
    • Cloud computing
    • On-Demand Computing
    • Ubiquitous Computing
    • Performance and benchmarking techniques
    • Programming techniques for HPC
    • Theoretical issues in Parallel, Cluster and Distributed systems
    • HPC Applications
    • System software for HPC

Submission Process

Authors are advised to submit original, unpublished research papers that are not being considered for publication in any other forum. The authors can submit up to a maximum of 8 ACM conference pages (about 4000 words).At least one author is required to attend the conference and present the paper.

Easychair Submission Page: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=compute2012

Submission Templates

  • Latex: http://www.acm.org/publications/submissions/latex_style
  • Word: http://www.acm.org/publications/word_style/word-style-toc/

For details about the Organizing Committee, the Program Committee and other information, please see ACM Compute Pune 2012 page

CloudCamp: Cloud-computing (un-)Conference – 3 Sept

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CloudCamp http://cloudcamp.org/pune is coming to Pune this Saturday (September 3rd)! Sponsors include not only big companies and organizations like IBM, Microsoft, but also Pune-startup PubMatic.

CloudCamp will have a mix of invited speakers and barcamp style last-minute speaker. Talks include:

  • “Integrating Public/Private Cloud” by Vijay Sukthankar, Cloud Computing Leader at IBM
  • BigData use in Advertising by Anand Das of PubMatic
  • “Platform-as-a-Service” by TBD of Microsoft
  • “CloudWorkshop – Does your app belong in the Cloud?” by Larry Carvalho of RobustCloud

For a detailed schedule and other information see the CloudCamp website. The event is at VITS hotel, near Balewadi Stadium, from 9:30am to 4pm.

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here

Call for Speakers / Demos – NASSCOM Game Developer Conference, Pune

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The NASSCOM Game Developer Conference started as an experiment in 2009 to address the game developer community in India which grew into an independent 2 day conference in its 2nd year attended by more than 350 + delegates and fabulous talks, post mortems and panel discussions.

Now the 3rd edition is here; Scheduled on 11th – 12th November, 2011 in Pune due to high demand.

The call for speakers / presenters is open. You can give a talk, or you can pitch your game. Proposals are invited for the following tracks:

  • Game Programming
  • Art
  • Game Design
  • Production
  • Gaming Business
  • General

Games on all platforms are welcom: mobile, handheld, consoles, PC, web.

Apply to be a speaker by sending this form to Shruti Verma.

More details about the event are here

Event Report: IndicThreads Conference on Mobile Application Development

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(This is a live-blog of the IndicThreads conference on mobile application development that is currently happening in Pune. Since this is a live blog, so please excuse the greater-than-normal number of errors and lack of coherence sometimes.)

NFC in mobile devices – Ashutosh Tripathy, Talentica

Ashutosh Tripathy talked about NFC in mobile devices and why it is important. NFC is “Near Field Communication”, which is a very short range wireless communication between devices. The range is very low – just a few centimeters, and the bandwidth is also low – just 424kbps max. But the important thing is the ease of use it gives in a large number of use cases – e.g. event tickets, sharing business cards, ID cards, easy printing, file sharing, mobile payments etc.

The important thing about NFC is that it does not work at a distance (and it can be configured so that it does not work when the screen is off). This means that NFC communication can only happen with the knowledge of the user of the device. Thus, for many applications you can get rid of complex security procedures and passcodes that are needed to prevent malicious users from getting access to your device without your knowledge.

For example:

  • Bluetooth + NFC gives instant Bluetooth pairing – without requiring passcodes and other complex mechanisms. So if you want to transfer a file between two devices, you bring them close together and NFC is used to set up the Bluetooth pairing. After this, the actual file transfer happens over Bluetooth, so that it will continue to work even when distance between the devices is increased.
  • Wi-Fi + NFC can similarly give very easy to use wi-fi configurations

NFC Enabled Phones in the market already:

  • Google Nexus S (Android)
  • Samsung Galaxy SII (Android)
  • Nokia C7
  • Blackberry Bold 9900 and 9930
  • Nokia 6131

Upcoming and rumored:

  • iPhone 5
  • Nokia N9, N5
  • Lots of Android 2.3.3 phones
  • LG Optimuz NET
  • Various Samsung BADA OS based phones

It is expected that most new smartphones will be NFC enabled soon.

Ashutosh followed it up with a demo of how to build an NFC app on Android.

Developing mobile enterprise applications – Yateen Shaha, SAS

More and more enterprise apps are now mobile enabled. The primary business drivers behind this trend is increased productivity, faster/better decisions, and thus competitive advantage.

Important Things to worry about when building enterprise mobile apps:

  • Delivering the right functionality – not all functionality can be supported in the mobile device. So choosing what is in and what is not included is important
  • Access Everywhere – User should be able to access the app from inside the company intranet, but also from outside over public networks.
  • Offline Access – Should be allowed
  • Protecting data – Security is very important to enterprise customers, so you need to take great pains to keep them happy.
    • Authentication could be device based, or user based, or ideally both.
    • Data Encryption:
      • Over the Air: The data being sent over the public internet should be encrypted
      • At Rest: The data stored on the device should also be encrypted, so that if the device gets lost, the data is still protected
  • Storage/Bandwidth limitations – Since storage and network bandwidth on the mobile device is going to be limited, you need to carefully design the architecture of the app (and the backend services supporting the app) in such a way that it does not require lots of data to be downloaded and stored locally.
    • Some of the decisions could be based on what kind of network connection the device is currently using. Thus, use network liberally when on wi-fi but be more careful when using 2G or 3G.
  • Code Reuse – having to maintain two different code bases, one for desktop apps, and another for mobile apps is a pain. Design the overall app (e.g. by using model-view-presenter patterns) so that maximum code is reused.

Tips and tricks:

  • Cache whenever you can, to improve performance
  • A good user experience is very critical – much more so than for desktop apps
  • Must take advantage of device features
  • Performance and Response time is critical for user acceptance

Other Talks

There was a panel discussion on “Mobile is the next Desktop.” I was one of the panelists, so unfortunately, I could not live-blog this. Topics discussed were why mobiles are going to take over the world, how developing for mobiles is different from developing for PCs, how the fragmentation in mobile (devices and platforms) is a huge pain (with no solution in sight), how html5 might or might not replace native apps, and other topics.

Mayur Tendulkar gave a presentation on Windows Phone 7. Most of what he said was similar to the talk he gave a few months back at TechWeekend 7, so I’m not repeating it here.

Abhay Aggarwal, from Xebia India talked about building an app that needs to target multiple screens. These are the various sizes available: 240×320, 240×400, 320×480, 360×640, 480×800, 540×960, this doesn’t even count the tablets. He talked about a process & architecture that would minimize the pain of doing this.

(At this point I had to leave even though there where two more talks later in the day, and a full day of talks the next day that I could not attend. However, the presentations are online at http://m11.indicthreads.com if you’re interested.)